M7: Process management

Currently your operating system has only been able to run one process,
probably sosh. In this milestone you will implement the
process related system calls: process_create,
process_delete, my_id,
process_status and process_wait. Obviously each
new process should run it its own address space. This will require you to
carefully manage L4 memory spaces.

Currently process_create need only run executables
contained within the DITE image, and need only run these executables
in-place, and only run them successfully once.

You are supplied with a sos_get_binfo_rec function which
iterates over the entries of the dite image.
sos/main.c:init_thread has an example of how to iterate over
the entries.

sosh has an exec command. This command provides a simple
interface to the process_create system call. In a similar
style to UNIX shells, if the third argument to exec is an
'&' then it will run the process in the background.
Otherwise sosh will use process_wait to wait until the child
process has finished executing.

To add more executables to the bootimg.bin file you will need to create
more newapp = app_env.Application("newapp") in the top-level
SConstruct file. In the Bootimage command you can append a comma seperated
list of new applications. Each of these images will automatically be added
to the dite image.

NOTE: The stime and ctime
fields of the process_t data structure are optional. Unlike
previous versions of L4, Pistachio does not maintain these values for you.

Design issues

As with most milestones, a lot of the design work will be working out
suitable data structures to hold process information. You may also need to
extend other data structures in your operating system to handle multiple
processes.

You also probably want to change your crt so that when a
process's main function exits it will kill itself.

Assessment

You should show sosh executing a sub-process and show that
the ps command works. As processes will be running in-place
you need only execute each one once.

You may want to add a kill command to sosh to show that
process_delete works.

As always you should be able to explain the data structures and
algorithms used.